Ashburton Guardian Magna est Veritas et Prævalebit MONDAY, MARCH 22, 1948. COMMUNIST COUP

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 68, Issue 137, 22 March 1948, Page 2

Ashburton Guardian Magna est Veritas et Prævalebit MONDAY, MARCH 22, 1948. COMMUNIST COUP

The Communist coup in Czechoslovakia is the main cause of most of the uneasiness existing at the moment concerning world affairs. The rapid change which came over the country set the heads of other nations thinking, and they have not been slow to draw fairly accurate conclusions. The main point about the coup j was that it was a revolution, and this fact has fairly generally been ! appreciated. The Communists !struck quickly. Vast numbers of I workers were summoned to ! Prague to lie told the old story ; ot the Fatherland in danger, counter-revolution, plot against the State and the existence of a ring of spies working on behalf of foreign Powers. Meanwhile the police stood by to prevent coun-ter-demonstrations, and committees of action, modelled on workers’ Soviets in the early days of the Russian Revolution, seized control of every factory and farm. The secret police, .wholly Communist in composition, dealt with non-Communist politicians. Into,' these series of events competent observers have been able to read a similarity with Nazi tactics, for example, the allegation of a plot and the precipitation of violent action by a highly organised minority body. But observers have not been able to subscribe to ‘the claims put forward by the Communists in support of their action. They asserted that they had to act because a Communist Minister was accused of hatching a plot and of connivance in the possession by Communists of illegal weapons. This accusation, which has never been adequately refuted, was itself the original cause of Communist action. Then the Communists alleged that they were obliged to carry out a coup because of the parliamentary nature of the new Czech Government. But their references to this were manifestly inconsistent when compared with their declarjed aims, as promulgated by the I Second Comintern Congress in j 1920, thus: “Communism rejects Parliamentarianism as a form of | future society; it rejects it as a 'form of class dictatorship over the proletariat; it rejects the possibility of the slow conquest of Parliament; its fixed aim is the destruction of Parliamentary Government. Therefore, there can only be the question of utilising bourgeois State institutions with the object of destroying them.” There in a nutshell we have the chief aim of the Communists. There, can be no doubt concerning their intentions, and it is certainly heartening to read that the Western Powers are agreed on the need to stand together, for in their unity lies one of the main prospects of maintaining peace.